selves embroiled in controversy, but that's
what happened several weeks ago, when
reports surfaced that a rabbit carcass was
to appear in "As You Like It," and would
be skinned and beheaded onstage. The
idea was to evoke the coarseness of coun-
try life: no match, it seems, for the que a -
siness of city life. Rabbit lovers called in to
complain, and, days before opening, the
director cut the carcasses from the show.
'We were told that they couldn't source
them in the same way in this country,"
Wimperis said. (In Stratford, they were
supplied by a farm.) The company had
learned a crucial lesson about Manhattan-
Upon- Hudson: in props, as in fine dining,
provenance is all.
-Michael Schulman
FIELD TRIP
LIFE IN THE WOODS
...-
S ometime in July, 1844, Henry David
Thoreau climbed to the top of Mt.
Greylock, Massachusetts's highest peak,
where, after spending a cold night in a
box, he encountered the sublime. Re-
creating Thoreau's ascent has become an
annual tradition, and on a recent Satur-
day ten people and a dog gathered at the
Bellows Pipe trailhead to make the five-
and-a-half-mile trek (eleven if you plan
on returning).
Lauren Stevens, a local author, is the
guiding spirit behind the enterprise. He
showed up in aT-shirt that featured a
bearded Thoreau wearing a dour expres-
sion. Stevens had brought along copies of
Thoreau's description of his climb, which
appears-curiously-in his "A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers."
(Mt. Greylock, in the northwestern cor-
ner of the state, is nowhere near the Con-
cord and Merrimack Rivers.) As he was
passing out the copies, Stevens, who has
made the trip some fifteen times, asked
people to say a few words about why they
were there. One man said he was inter-
ested in Thoreau's Transcendentalism,
another in his thinking on civil disobedi-
ence. A third man said he was attracted to
Thoreau's work as an arsonist.
As for why Thoreau was there, a case
can be made that he was running away
from home. When he made the trip, he
was twenty-seven years old and had been
trying (unsuccessfully) to break into the
New York publishing world. The Dial,
the Transcendentalist journal he'd oc-
casionally contributed to, had recently
closed. He'd proposed, four years earlier,
to a young woman from Scituate and been
rejected. Just a few months before climb-
ing Mt. Greylock, Thoreau had set fire to
several hundred acres of woods near his
family s home, in Concord, while trying
to cook a fish chowder. Many people in
town never forgave him for this accident.
"You can think of Thoreau as not only
wanting to go west to Mt. Greylock in
order to have that experience," Stevens
observed. "You can also say, well, he
wanted to get out of Concord."
Although Thoreau began his ascent
in the afternoon, the reënactors set off
at around ten-thirty in the morning. The
trail led through dense woods. About
half a mile in, the group arrived at a large
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Henry David Thoreau
hole in the ground, filled with dead
leaves. Stevens explained that in the
eighteen-forties the base of Mt. Grey-
lock was cleared in order to graze cattle
and sheep. The hole represents what
was left of a farmhouse where Thoreau
stopped on his way up. According to his
description, he was met at the house by a
"frank and hospitable young woman,"
who came out to speak to him in her
dressing gown. The woman took Tho-
reau for a student from nearby Williams
College-"a pretty wild set of fellows."
One year, Stevens recalled, he had had
two reënactors play the scene-the
woman wore a nightgown over her hik-
ing clothes-but since Thoreau hadn't
recorded any dialogue, they soon ran out
of things to say.
The next stop was another hole in the
ground, this one larger than the first and
covered by ferns. It was the remnant of a
second farmhouse, whose owner warned
Thoreau that he would find the rest of the
way up "as steep as the roof of a house"
and said there was no way he would reach
the summit by nightfall. Thoreau ignored
him. "So far as my experience goes, trav-
elers generally exaggerate the difficulties
of the way," he wrote.
Around noon, the reënactors reached
a lean-to, and stopped to eat lunch. Ste-
vens passed around a reproduction of a
newspaper from July, 1844-the Boston
Daily Advertiser-whose yellowed pages
were filled mosdy with ads for commod-
ities like sperm oil. A troop of Boy Scouts
arrived, also planning to use the lean-to
for lunch. They seemed surprised and
then bored by all the talk of Thoreau. Sev-
eral pulled out their cell phones. The rest
of the way up was, indeed, "as steep as the
roof of a house."
In Thoreau's day, the only structure
atop Mt. Greylock-elevation 3,491
feet-was a meteorological tower. Hav-
ing neglected to bring a blanket, he slept
against the base of the tower, under some
stray boards that he fashioned into a struc-
ture resembling a coffin. The next morn-
ing, he awoke to find himself cut off from
the world below by "an ocean of mist."
Alone in this "undulating country of
clouds," he glimpsed what he called "the
new terra firmà' of his future life, a vision
that prefigured his less elevated but more
long-term retreat, the following July, to
Walden Pond.
Today at the summitofMt. Greylock,
there's a hundred-foot war memorial, a
television tower, a lodge, and a parking
lot. (A Depression-era road makes it pos-
sible to drive all the way up the moun-
tain.) "When the reënactors emerged at
the war memorial, scores of visitors were
milling around, calling out to one another
and snapping photographs. Anyepipha-
nies that the members of the group had
they kept to themselves. Then theyad-
justed their packs and headed back down.
-Elizabeth Kolbert
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 8, 2011 21